After Speaker Mike Johnson finalized a series of changes aimed at winning over holdouts, a key committee approved the measure. But its fate in a floor vote was far from assured.
House Republican leaders labored on Wednesday to find the votes to pass their sweeping domestic policy bill, pushing it past a key hurdle and effectively daring recalcitrant lawmakers to fall in line as they raced toward a floor vote on the main elements of President Trump’s agenda.
With several G.O.P. lawmakers still unsatisfied with the sprawling tax and spending cut package, Speaker Mike Johnson and his deputies spent Wednesday toiling behind the scenes to hammer out concessions to cobble together the votes in their fractious ranks.
They were able to push the process forward late Wednesday night,when the powerful House Rules Committee voted to bring the legislation to the floor after a 22-hour session.
But it seemed that even after a meeting with Mr. Trump and fiscal conservatives at the White House, it was still uncertain whether Mr. Johnson had the votes in hand to pass the bill. He spent Wednesday evening briefing lawmakers on a list of changes he had negotiated with a wide spectrum of factions across his conference.
They included speeding up new work requirements for Medicaid, increasing the state and local tax deduction, expanding a rollback of clean-energy tax credits created by the Biden administration in the Inflation Reduction Act and providing additional money to reimburse states for immigration enforcement efforts.
It was not clear whether those concessions would be enough to flip Republican opponents of the bill, whose ranks appeared to be growing on Wednesday as the negotiations dragged on, or whether they might alienate other lawmakers who had been supporters before the changes were made.
